The outrage around the Nashik TCS case reveals not innocence, but society’s refusal to examine what it has long normalized. Sexual predation, institutional suppression, and religious coercion arise from the same uninquired ego shaped by homes, media, education, and social values. Real change requires honest self-examination, not merely stricter procedures or temporary shock.
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Originally published in The Sunday Guardian on 3 may '26
The Nashik TCS case has triggered national outrage, but beneath the shock lies a deeper reality: a society long conditioned to normalize predation, silence complaints, and avoid confronting its own complicity
What a society is willing to be surprised by tells you precisely what it has agreed not to examine. The TCS Nashik case produced, above all else, a week of national shock: eight women, four years of sustained complaint, a manager positioned to receive those complaints allegedly choosing instead to suppress them, sexual predation running alongside institutional self-protection alongside coercive pressure toward religious conversion.
None of these three things is new. The predation, the cover, the reduction of religion to a numbers game: all three have been operating, visibly and continuously, across this society for as long as anyone currently registering horror at the case has been alive. And yet the country received these events as though they had arrived from somewhere else entirely, as though a Nashik call centre were a foreign country rather than a place staffed by people who grew up in the same households, watched the same films, and absorbed the same formation as the people now demanding accountability.
